The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘iPad’ Category

Like hello and whatnot.

Another year has flown by and I’m already cel­e­brat­ing my anniver­sary of being the northlon­don­hippy, again.

And by cel­e­brat­ing, of course I mean writ­ing this.

Whoopeeee…

Seven years ago today I started my orig­i­nal web­site on Blog­ger. Its still there, though I moved every­thing to this, my own hosted web­site a few years ago.

Go me!

Back at the begin­ning, I posted quite fre­quently, mainly because I had noth­ing bet­ter to do.

Blog­ging sprouted from a rel­a­tively brief period of unem­ploy­ment , it gave me some­thing to do with my time, when I wasn’t get­ting high or gob­bling magic mush­rooms, which were legal at the time.

You didn’t think I was going to get through this with­out a men­tion of shrooms, did you? Shrooms played an impor­tant part in the early days and I was a reg­u­lar con­sumer of them. Since the gov­ern­ment tight­ened up the reg­u­la­tions, I’ve been with­out them. I miss them, a lot. Shroom ref­er­ence ends.

Flash for­ward to seven years into the future, to this very day and you’ll see that I hardly post any­thing, any more. There’s prob­a­bly more posts about my lack of posts, than any other subject.

I don’t even attempt to make excuses any more, I’ve just accepted that my par­tic­i­pa­tion here is spo­radic and ran­dom. I pop up when­ever I feel like it, I just don’t feel like it very often.

That’s not strictly true, as I seem to con­tinue to main­tain a run­ning list of top­ics I want to cover, I just don’t seem to get around to doing it. Then, what­ever the topic might be, becomes less inter­est­ing to me, or less rel­e­vant and I delete it from my list and it just never gets written.

I’m back to mak­ing excuses again. Sorry, I’ll stop now.

It would be eas­ier if I could just beam my thoughts directly to the inter­net, I think that’s com­ing as a fea­ture this sum­mer in the iPhone 5, but don’t quote me on that. I wouldn’t want to be start­ing that sort of a rumour.

I know I bang on about Twit­ter a lot, but I do spend a lot more time there than I do on my own web­site. If you did want to bathe in the weird thoughts flow­ing through my head on a daily basis, that remains the best place to do it. Though again, my par­tic­i­pa­tion is ran­dom and spo­radic. I con­sume far more than I con­tribute to Twit­ter, but I do suf­fer from infor­ma­tion glut­tony and tech addiction.

That’s prob­a­bly one of the biggest changes to my life in the last seven years, the amount of tech­nol­ogy in it. I’ve always liked tech and toys, but here in the future, they are more per­va­sive and use­ful than ever before and I find that I am always con­nected, always con­sum­ing media.

A typ­i­cal day starts with me pick­ing my iPhone up from the bed­side table, switch­ing off air­plane mode and let­ting it check my email. I put it in air­plane mode when I go to bed, so it doesn’t ding or buzz with new mes­sages, but I leave it on because it is also my back up alarm clock.

I come down­stairs and fire up my iMac, which is the hub of my tech­no­log­i­cal exis­tence. The hard drive in it died last week and its being repaired this very sec­ond. Don’t worry, I have a TimeMa­chine back up, so I don’t think I’ve lost very much at all, but I am miss­ing my 27” beast very much.

I’ve been using my lifeboat com­puter in the mean­time, an orig­i­nal black Mac­Book that I think is nearly 5 years old. While I’m thank­ful that I’ve got it to use now, its painfully slow, its got about 25% of the screen space of my iMac and the view­ing angle of the LCD screen is not very good. Five years is a very long time in tech termss and my Mac­Book is def­i­nitely show­ing its age. Its bet­ter than noth­ing, loads better!

Any­way, my nor­mal rou­tine with the iMac is to switch it on as soon as I wake up, read the papers online, along with a few other web­sites, check my RSS feed reader, keep an eye on Twit­ter, do some work on some other web­sites I work on, deal with pro­fes­sional and per­sonal emails, sync and charge my iPhone and con­trol my Mac Mini.

My Mac Mini is around 4 and a 1/2 years old and is also show­ing its age. I use it as my media hub, its con­nected to my flatscreen tv and my A/V amp. I use it to play music (streamed around my house to two Air­Port Express units, one in the kitchen, one in my bed­room), I also stream online radio sta­tions the same way. I use the BBC’s iPlayer ser­vice, I down­load and play­back videos from Bit Tor­rent, I use it to screen XVID films friends give me, or even just to play­back videos I’ve shot myself. It gets used a lot. I mostly con­trol the Mac Mini with a remote con­trol, or I use OS X Screen Shar­ing to remotely use con­trol it from the iMac.

My iMac is a pow­er­ful com­puter, I use it to edit video and I mainly use iMovie. I also record my own music, using Logic Pro and a host of exter­nal toys and musi­cal instru­ments that con­nect to my iMac with ease

Once I’ve done every­thing I have to do on the iMac, I might move over to the sofa with my iPad. I surf, use Twit­ter, keep up with my RSS feed, all in a relaxed, com­fort­able way, but that’s not all I’ve done with it. I’ve also used it to edit video, write blog posts and record music. Some of the music pro­duc­tion apps I have are truly amaz­ing, espe­cially Apple’s new Garage­Band app. Its easy to lose hours of your day just play­ing around with it. I’m also a secret Angry Birds HD addict, but shhhh, don’t tell anyone.

My iPhone is always with me and I use it for so many things, its really a Swiss Army Knife of a gad­get. Its my cal­en­dar, my con­tact book, my mobile Twit­ter machine, RSS reader, inter­net browser, still cam­era, video cam­era, music player, film and video player, nav­i­ga­tion device, com­pass, photo edi­tor, video edi­tor, news por­tal, note taker, audio recorder, gam­ing device, clock, weather cen­tre, torch, hand­held track­pad for my Macs, email client, ref­er­ence library, text mes­sage device, oh and its a tele­phone and video­phone too! It does even more than that, I’m just run­ning out of steam think­ing of it all.

My point to all this tech his­tory is that none of this was pos­si­ble 7 years ago, 2 of the devices I just men­tioned couldn’t have even been imag­ined then.

In 2005, I had a run­ning joke here about my brand new all dig­i­tal lifestyle, right around the time I bought my first iMac. Its no joke today, my life truly is all dig­i­tal. So’s yours. So is everyone’s.

They like to describe all this as “dis­rup­tive tech­nol­ogy” and that’s a pretty accu­rate term, as long as you don’t see dis­rup­tion as a nec­es­sar­ily bad thing. I don’t buy CDs any more, I don’t go to record stores any more, because that indus­try has been dis­rupted by the ease and avail­abil­ity of music down­loads. If you own a chain of music stores, you’re not going to like this sort of dis­rup­tion, but if you are a keen media con­sumer, you’re prob­a­bly pretty happy about it.

Tech­nol­ogy isn’t the only thing that’s dis­rupted my life in the last seven years, there’s also been some ill­ness and some death. When it comes to dis­rup­tion, noth­ing else comes close.

Both of my par­ents passed away since I started this web­site. My father was already ill when I started it, and his can­cer fea­tured fre­quently back in the day. Some­where, in the archive, is a post called “Dad’s piss­ing blood again” and I’m sur­prised it didn’t win any awards. He died before this blog was a year old.

My mother crossed over to the great beyond at Christ­mas, two years ago. Noth­ing fills you with the hol­i­day spirit like a bereave­ment on Xmas eve, and that applies to the future too, Xmas will now and for­ever be a reminder of her death.

While my mother had health prob­lems for years, her sud­den death was unex­pected. My father died slowly over the course of a year and we pretty much knew when his death was com­ing to the day. I last spoke to him two days before he died and I got to say good­bye. I didn’t have that chance with my mother.

I’ve become old in the last seven years, at least in my head I have. In my head I’m not 48, I’m “push­ing 50”. One of those posts I haven’t writ­ten is enti­tled “My unhealthy obses­sion with death” and I will get around to writ­ing it, mainly because I’m hop­ing that spit­ting out a life time of death obses­sion might help me move past it. Or not. Who knows.

Blog­ging is like ther­apy for me some­times, its a good way to try to work shit out.

I don’t really think I will ever work out my weird obses­sion with death, specif­i­cally my own. I’ve imag­ined my moment of death so many times, in so many ways, yet I know that none of it has prob­a­bly come close to what­ever hor­ri­ble fate awaits me, as it awaits us all.

Keep an eye out for my death post, it will be a cheery lit­tle num­ber, guar­an­teed to lift your spir­its and make you want to do a happy dance down the street.

The truth is that I feel expend­able, dis­pos­able and irrel­e­vant because I am get­ting old. Maybe that’s nor­mal. Maybe there’s no such thing as normal.

I can feel my body break­ing down, I dis­cover some new ache or pain on a daily basis. My joints creak, my mus­cles throb, my bones ache and I’ve been diag­nosed with a long term health prob­lem that requires daily med­ica­tion for the rest of my life.

Mid­dle age is a joy.

Mid­dle age is stu­pidly named. Either you are young or you’re old. I’m old. Phys­i­cally I am, but in my head I’m still 18 years old and full of all the hopes, ideas and dreams I had at that age. Sad, eh?

I’m the same per­son I was back then, I might move a bit slower and have loads more knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence, but I’m still me.

And I still smoke weed.

That was one of my goals when I started blog­ging, to fur­ther the cannabis cause. I’ve been smok­ing weed every day, for a cou­ple of months shy of 30 years. I would qual­ify my use as a com­bi­na­tion of recre­ational and med­i­c­i­nal, though its cer­tainly more med­i­c­i­nal these days.

Weed should be legal and the fact that its not shows just how mixed up our cur­rent drug pol­icy has become. Cannabis can be so ben­e­fi­cial in so many ways.

Right now, in these dif­fi­cult and depress­ing eco­nomic times, cannabis is a cash crop our lead­ers should not be ignor­ing. A licensed, reg­u­lated and more impor­tantly taxed cannabis mar­ket would be a much needed boon to the econ­omy. Instead they would rather close schools, hos­pi­tals and libraries and let crim­i­nals con­trol the mar­ket. Its as fool­ish and short­sighted as it sounds.

I’m not going to bang on about it too much now, my posi­tion is clear.

I may not be as pro­lific as I once was, but there’s a giant archive of nearly 750 posts to explore. You might learn to love me, you might come to hate me, but I’m sure you can waste plenty of time here, if you desire.

So that’s it, my weird and ram­bling reflec­tion of the last seven years of liv­ing my life online, just for you. I’m always here, just a few mouse clicks away. Come hang out with me, any time.

If the first seven years are any­thing to go by, the next seven ought to be a real gas, man! Groovy!

I just want to share a few obser­va­tions about the iPad, now that I’ve had a cou­ple of days to fon­dle mine. Believe the hype.

I’m not going to give you a full review of it, there’s already been count­less detailed run-throughs of the iPad from peo­ple who’ve had them for ages. I got mine on Fri­day, UK launch day, so I know I’m late to the iPad party.

The first thing I really noticed was how ridicu­lously thin it is, its easy to hold but a lit­tle heav­ier than you might expect. Its also easy to sit in a com­fort­able nor­mal posi­tion on the sofa with it propped in your lap, bal­anced with a light one handed grip.

What I fore­see is a mar­ket for lap-pillow like stands, that keep it at a com­fort­able view­ing angle, while let­ting it rest securely with­out using your hands. For watch­ing films and videos, some­thing sim­ple like that would be ideal.

The screen is bright and extra­or­di­nar­ily sharp, hi-res colour pho­tographs look unbe­liev­ably crisp and clear with vivid, deep colours. Video also looks good, though its all been in stan­dard def for me so far.

Web­sites fill the screen smoothly, there’s no need to pinch and zoom to see or read any­thing. Like the iPhone, the inter­face is respon­sive and smooth.

It is a fin­ger­print mag­net, more so than my iPhone 3GS, which shares the same oleo­pho­bic coat­ing, but doesn’t seem to be as notice­able because of its smaller size. Keep a microfi­bre cloth nearby, or a lens cloth from any cam­era shop.

Apple’s case (or some­thing sim­i­lar) is absolutely an essen­tial acces­sory. The Apple Case for iPad is very well designed, its sim­ple to secure the iPad inside it. It is very thin and doesn’t add much addi­tional weight, but pro­vides extra pro­tec­tion and flex­i­bil­ity, allow­ing you to posi­tion the iPad for upright, wide screen view­ing, or angling it on a desk for more com­fort­able typ­ing. Its folio-style, with a flap that cov­ers the screen while dou­bling as a sort of reen­forced kick-stand. Its very good.

There are already a lot of iPad opti­mised apps out there, I’ll men­tion a few quickly that have grabbed my attention:

- Wun­der Radio — an inter­net radio sta­tion aggre­ga­tor that seems to offer just about every inter­net sta­tion in the world. It also uses GPS to gen­er­ate a list of local sta­tions and it did very well find­ing them around me. The audio streams are high qual­ity, there’s iTunes tag­ging for sta­tions that sup­port it and the inter­face is clean and easy to use.

- Air Video — I know this one is on the top of many people’s lists and for good rea­son, it works very well. Air Video let’s you stream just about any video file from a Mac on the same net­work, con­vert­ing the video on the fly as you watch. I’ve streamed .avi’s, MP4’s and hi-def MKV’s from my Mac Mini to the iPad already with­out any lag or drop out. You do need to install a small piece of soft­ware on the host Mac to act as server and point it to your video direc­tory in the Finder, but once you do that the iPad finds the server auto­mat­i­cally. From there you nav­i­gate to your film or tv show, and after a very quick buffer time of 5–10 sec­onds, the video is deliv­ered to your iPad. I already had this one for the iPhone and a recent update made it iPad friendly too.

- News­Rack — has been my RSS reader of choice for a while on my iPhone, with its sim­ple inter­face and abil­ity to sync with my Google Feed Reader account, it works very well. Now opti­mised for the iPad, the same app is serv­ing dou­ble duty for me, at no extra cost. News­Rack uses the extra screen real estate to good effect, giv­ing you a left col­umn for your feeds and a large read­ing win­dow on the right side. You can also open links within the app.

- Pin­BallHD — bought this one yes­ter­day on the strength of the reviews and sales in the iTunes app store, glad I did. The graph­ics and game­play blew me away and am find­ing it very addic­tive. Haven’t really played or bought many games for my iPhone, but I can see how much bet­ter the iPad is for play­ing any­thing because of its larger size.

The iPad is prob­a­bly more dis­rup­tive than any­one has realised yet, its an entirely new class of device. Other man­u­fac­tures will be try­ing to catch up, this form of com­put­ing is going to explode in pop­u­lar­ity. It can replace so many dif­fer­ent devices, not just lap­tops or net­books, but portable radios, portable TVs and DVD play­ers, MP3 play­ers, portable game con­soles, e-readers and prob­a­bly a mil­lion other things I haven’t even thought of yet. It is so thin, so light, so easy to carry along with you, the temp­ta­tion to never put it down is immense.

Is it an essen­tial? No, not if you already have some sort of com­puter, but as lux­u­ries go, it pretty damn use­ful. If you’re think­ing about tak­ing the plunge, all you need to do is spend 5 min­utes using one and you will be ready to dive in deep.